Recent reads: The Straw Men, by Michael Marshall

I recently finished reading Michael Marshall's thriller The Straw Men. Good brain candy that kept me munching. Naturally, as I writer, I first absorbed the "don't do this" lessons. I need to go back for the "why it works" lessons. Many great writers often wrote badly: Dickens, Melville, Lovecraft, Poe. It's a lot easier to analyze what they did wrong than what they did right. (H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar A. Poe, Nathanael Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, the American Transcendentalists and the young W.B. Yeats -- when he was all Erin and faery folk -- these were my early literary influences. Later came William Blake, Alfred Jarry, Mina Loy, H.D., the mature Yeats, William Shakespeare, Kenneth Patchen, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens.)

What was I talking about again? Oh, Marshall. In what is mostly a well-written book, the dialogue is sometimes too clever to be credible. Coincidences start piling up towards the end, making my disbelief-suspending muscles ache. There were some minor point-of-view issues in the later chapters, but I think the author had written himself into a corner in that regard.

On the positive side, Marshall writes action scenes well, showing chaos without losing clarity. He brings even bit players to life. Pacing is excellent. Technology fares well in this novel, with only the rare fumble -- the work, I'm guessing, of somebody who has never been a developer but has done his research. (Note, however, that you can't see "crashed Java code" in the HTML source for a web page.) It's not a new novel and some of the tech is dated, but that's hardly Marshall's fault.